


some other time, some other place

by meowcosm



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: During Timeskip (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Fantasizing, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension, mentions of parental abuse, wet dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:00:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23010634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meowcosm/pseuds/meowcosm
Summary: With enough time, and with enough patience, you can beat yourself back. But you can never truly turn yourself away.
Relationships: Lorenz Hellman Gloucester/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 4
Kudos: 84





	some other time, some other place

If this was some other time, some other place, Lorenz thinks he and Claude might get along.

If he were not who he is- the shining light of the Leicester Alliance- and Claude was not who he is (an imposter, or at the very least a weak link), they might have been able to work together. For Claude isn’t… _bad_ , not as a whole. He is irritating, bordering on infuriating, indeed- but that’s because of what he’s doing. What he’s standing in the way of. In a situation external to that- well, who knows how it could work out between them?

But shifting on the pleasant down of his mattress, trying to find one spot that isn’t tainted by emission, isn’t where Lorenz ever expected to chase those feelings of existential curiousity. Yes, some of their conversations had awoken him to Claude’s more sensitive and refined aspects, not to mention what seemed to be an unrivalled deductive mind. But there were many people Lorenz respected. Holst, for example, who had provided him a perfectly reasonable standard of a noble during his youth. His classmates from the time before Garreg Mach, who had been held all their lives to the same rigid and glimmering standards of nobility that were instrumental to the balance of the world.

He had never dreamt of them, never in the fashion he dreamt of Claude. Never woke up to the sound of their names on his lips, underclothes stained through with sticky fluid, feeling so terribly worn inside even when the winter sun shining through his curtains clearly signalled a good night’s rest. Such experiences troubled him, though Manuela had assured him upon his private departure to the infirmary that it was entirely normal for a man his age to go through such processes during the night. A mechanism of involuntary sexual release, triggered by accident, by no fault of his own. At the very least, he felt comforted by the fact that he was not consciously debasing himself (for father had always told him that such base instincts were reserved for marriage, for a good noblewoman, for a purpose-)

But,

Lorenz wonders if she’d say the same if he’d mentioned Claude. Even working past the admittedly unlikely scenario of her belittling him in the way the Count surely would, such feelings- such behaviour, even of the unconscious variety- could not be _normal_. Lust between two men was already unconscionable, but Claude? Who made his heart race in anger every time he saw him, who made him want to yank on that stupid braid and unravel it, whose pretty little mouth would be much nicer if it was covered-

There it was again. His foolish, ill-willed body come to betray him once more. Taut and hungry in a way that defies explanation. Wanting something too horrific to even touch. Only giving in to silence when he slipped his hand into the area that troubled him, allowed himself to touch. His other hand over his mouth, as a rule, preventing him from saying what was too rapturous to say.

Lorenz remembers a lot of things. He remembers visiting private art collections as a boy, perhaps 13, manuscripts and finely crafted instruments hidden amongst the possessions of his father’s acquaintances. A marble statue, deftly carved into the shape of a man with an arrow jutting from the jagged lines of his hip, stone somehow reminiscent of fabric draped so gently over his lower half. It was his favourite, perhaps the only work he never quite tired of looking at, and he had gotten in a great deal of trouble for touching it, for trying to caress the ivory sinew of its calves. Months after, with Lorenz trying his best to forget about the week he had spent confined in his room for his transgression, they visited once more; and he found the pillar which once held the figure standing vacant. He had felt happy at the time; for the statue had gotten him in such trouble, the sort of trouble where his father stood and screamed through the door which weakly barricaded his room. There would be no more trouble if there was nothing there to want. But in its absence, he had still wanted it; how could he not have?

It was beautiful.

Claude’s hips, which arch upward in his dream, remind Lorenz of the statue. The whiteness of his release reminds him of the marble, and his dreams are always the same.

What could be, and what is.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you very much for reading!  
> if you liked this, i'd hugely appreciate a comment or a kudos. 
> 
> twitter: @millimallow


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